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325 points jemmyw | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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FateOfNations ◴[] No.45767064[source]
At some point customer service died. Businesses of seem to no longer be interested in dealing with customers. Good customers come in all shapes and sizes, and often don't exactly fit a cookie cutter. It's frustrating to see businesses just cut and run the moment something becomes a problem that needs more than a series of pre-scripted responses to be resolved.
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atmavatar ◴[] No.45767196[source]
There was a time when the general consensus was that treating customers well would result in greater retention, which, in turn, would ultimately prove to be net positive profit-wise over time.

It seems like that changed somewhere around the turn of the century, whereby businesses started to decide that it was better to cut down on customer service, and in some cases, go so far as to ban customers. The first cases of this I recall reading about had to do with Best Buy, and specifically their policy of banning people from their stores who made a lot of returns.

I'm not really sure how it ultimately maths out - i.e., whether it's long-term optimal to drop troublesome customers or merely short-term optimal, and this was primarily taken from the perspective of retail.

As such, I'm sure the math changes a little for subscription services. However, I also recall my prior employer's support activity followed a power law distribution across its clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if a policy to drop particularly noisy clients is a net savings there as well.

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1. csomar ◴[] No.45768904[source]
It did "math out" because these industries heavily lobbied and regulated that starting an alternative is close to impossible. Think about Wise: How many companies out there have the same service? The closest are Revolut and Airwallex. So in a world of 8 billion people and millions of businesses, there are only 3 companies that do the same thing that Wise do. In comparison, there are thousands of banks around the world.
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2. cjs_ac ◴[] No.45769782[source]
Wise's USP is a consequence of the way the US banking industry works (possibly as a result of US regulation). Free and instantaneous interbank transfers are ubiquitous in other banking systems, as are low-fee international transfers.
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3. graemep ◴[] No.45770703[source]
Wise is a British company with lots of customers around the world, the article is by someone in New Zealand.

It is cheaper than British banks for international transfers. Its business accounts are both easier to open and cheaper to run than those of the banks.

You are right that transfers from personal bank accounts in the UK are usually free and rapid (usually immediate, guaranteed to be within two hours), and similar or better in many other places, but Wise still has an offering beyond that.

4. lmz ◴[] No.45778620[source]
Low fee international transfers are not ubiquitous unless you're talking about SEPA.